


Ugly Like Me

by Fudgyokra



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [6]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Pseudo-Incest, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, intimacy as self-harm???, mentions of other intra-batfam ships, vague one-sided JayDick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 02:41:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16845553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fudgyokra/pseuds/Fudgyokra
Summary: Bruce is willing to pry him from the Pit’s claws even if it leaves scars.





	Ugly Like Me

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Shaking and Shivering (+BruJay), requested by an anon on Tumblr.

When Jason comes back to life, he tears his nails ragged unearthing himself from the ground, all the way until his fingers are stripped to the bone. He yells in the street, screams, sobs, and curses god’s name when he realizes what he’s just done and who wasn’t there to help him. He does a lot of things that night, but he does not tremble, not once.

/

There’s a long adjustment period involving bullets and blood, but Bruce is willing to pry him from the Pit’s claws even if it leaves scars. There are plenty already, so what was the harm in a couple more?

/

Tim’s very existence makes the anger flare hotter. Dick’s cools it down. Either way, a sense of panic pervades the air filtering into Jason’s lungs, and he thinks it better to let bygones be bygones than to waste one more minute of his new life trying to fight his way through these fledglings. It’s only to get to who he really wants to dump his concoction of emotions on, anyway.

Most of the feelings sit and rot in his stomach, even once assimilation back into the family he only halfway wants to be part of begins. That isn’t true, he thinks; he wants to be part of the family, he just doesn’t want to be the lost son. Doesn’t want to be a brother. He tries to say that out loud but his words, his feelings, and his lunch all end up swimming in the toilet bowl. He retches until his throat burns and he can no longer remember why he thought admitting a secret so deep would make anything less volatile.

Bruce watches him from the doorway expecting tremors, as a heaving body is wont to give, but finding none beneath the tight expanse of Jason’s suit. Only a slight twitch of muscle as his palms press down on the toilet rim and his arms lift him up, and by then the stock-still way he stands tells Bruce he’d better be gone when Jason turns around. So, sourly, he vanishes.

/

For a while, it’s okay. He’s home, he’s getting along better with Tim and even smiling at Alfred and Damian. It comes to a crashing halt when Dick wraps him in a hug and Jason reacts the only way he can without biting his tongue bloody: He shoves him off, hard, until Dick’s back collides painfully with the wall and Jason has to redirect his anger outward with an accusatory point of his finger, or else it’ll get jammed inside with the rest of his stewing self-hatred. “Don’t you dare touch me,” he hisses, and when Dick looks into his eyes he sees something undeniably broken.

This anger is recognizable to Bruce from a specific kind of torment, which he thought he’d never see without looking in a mirror, and the furious whoosh of breath Dick expels tells him (and probably Jason, too) that he doesn’t understand it. The internal war of a man who wants something he can’t allow himself to have. Dick’s hands shake when he shoves past him, out of the manor, but Bruce is looking down at Jason’s just to ponder why his  _don’t._

Their eyes meet and lock for several poisonous seconds. “We need to talk,” Bruce says, and either his words or his gaze must give him away, because Jason nods.

“Tomorrow,” he answers. “But you’ll have to find me, first.”

/

It’s almost laughably easy to pinpoint the location of his favorite little hole-in-the-wall bar tucked in the bowels of the Narrows. The bowels of the bowels, Jason jokes, but it’s the only real home he’s ever known.

They walk together to his nearby safe-house, where he lets Bruce in with little preamble and even less surety.

In the time he’s been human again, he hasn’t contacted anyone on purpose, much less  _him._  There’s a long list of reasons he drinks, but he thinks Bruce Wayne probably dominates it. A man like him always does. Jason thinks he likes that, if only because the pinch of desire that hits him below the belt hurts worse than it helps, and that’s exactly what he deserves for thinking the way he’s thinking. The way he always has thought, and  _shame_  on him, doesn’t he know that’s a  _sin?_  The priestess who’d said that to him once upon a time didn’t seem to appreciate the wiles or the hormones of a fifteen-year-old boy, least of all one like him.

His skin is freezing from the biting wind, but the pulse in his wrist when Bruce grabs it thrums warmly with the rush of blood in his veins. In spite of the temperature and the touch, he doesn’t shiver, not now and not ever. He wants Bruce to make him. He wants Bruce to  _want_  to make him. So, tentatively, he flattens his palm and presses upward to make the man release him, and then grabs him right back, fingers tight around the cleanly-pressed cuffs of the man’s dress shirt while he looks into his eyes and gauges whether the flickering of guilt there is the right kind. Somewhere along the way, he decides it doesn’t really matter and tugs Bruce’s hand brazenly down to his belt, then lower, between his legs. They’re nearly chest to chest and Bruce’s breath, not a hitch to be heard, fans pleasantly across his mouth.

Jason watches his Adam’s apple bob with apprehension before he leans down and kisses him like he knows he’s not supposed to.

Another thing they’re not supposed to be doing is crawling into the bed--for a variety of reasons. One of them is because Jason’s always imagined it’d be someone else, someone brooding and dark-haired and vigilant but not as broad as Bruce and not as ruined as Jason. Another is that the romantic comfort of his sheets isn’t what he deserves, nor is it precisely what he’s craving right now. The last of them is the obvious fact that they’re supposed to be  _family,_  and family doesn’t want each other like this.

Bruce’s fingers hook inside of him and drag across something that makes the dim light of his bedroom flash fluorescent-white. He could have keened, could have cursed, but what he does is desperately grunt out a name that isn’t the one belonging to who’s currently on top of him.

It doesn’t faze either of them, and that’s fucked up, isn’t it? he thinks with an almost hysterical laugh as Bruce’s fingers leave and something thicker starts opening him up. Everything plays out to the tune of a moan that pairs well with the curve of his spine off the mattress, and it feels like the perfect blend of right and wrong he’s been religiously searching for all these years.

“You want him to touch you like this?” Bruce asks, and whether he means the sex or the curl of his fist around Jason’s throat, he answers with another long, encouraging sound. The man persists. “Is that what you want?”

Jason has just enough room to swallow hard and properly tell the painful truth. “Him. You. Anybody.”

Bruce flinches in the way that means he received the exact answer he was hoping for, even if he didn’t want to hear it out loud. It stings because it clearly hits too close to home, but Jason doesn’t bother himself worrying about whether it implies feelings for him or for Dick. Or maybe Tim?  _Damian?_ How could he care when everything sets into motion and it’s hard and fast and dizzying and perfect and wrong?

For the first time since he left the Lazarus Pit, he feels sensations coming alive: A body-racking spasm, tearing a scream from his throat that’s so primal it finally, blessedly, wakes him up. He’s no longer a zombie, no longer the dead son, but a man hitting his peak to the rapid-fire feeling of every one of his limbs quivering so hard he has to clench his fists in the sheets to keep himself grounded.

The best part is Bruce using him to completion, because it makes him feel useful. Loved. And unlike when they’d begun, he isn’t numb all over. Sure, he’s betrayed a part of himself he swore he would keep hidden forever, but that, he thinks with a blissed-out grin, is finally painful enough to make him  _feel_  something.

And he shakes, and he shakes, and he shakes.


End file.
